Part Two: We Just Can't Predict, Chapter 12: Epistemocracy, a Dream; Chapter 13: Appelles the Painter, or What Do You Do if You Cannot Predict? Summary and Analysis

Summary

In Chapter 12 Taleb described his idea of utopia as an epistemocracy in which the fundamental idea was to run the society from a basic awareness of ignorance instead of knowledge. He restated in different forms the trouble with our conceptions that have been mistaken for knowledge and brought out the observation that a forward process is easier than a backward process. The analogy used was predicting the shape of a puddle that would form from a melting ice cube (predictive) versus determining what kind of ice cube formed a puddle, if a melting ice cube was...